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Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Keah Schuenemann, assistant professor of Meteorology, will join renowned researchers from around the world to contribute to a new University of Queensland (UQ) EdX course that debuts April 28. The course, called “Making Sense of Climate Science Denial,” will explore the underlying causes of commonly held misperceptions about global climate change.

The course, which is available to anyone around the world free of charge, will feature researchers from universities in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Interviews will be conducted by veteran broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

“Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. However, less than half of Americans think global warming is mostly caused by human activities, while half of the U.S. Senate has voted that humans weren’t causing global warming,” said John Cook, UQ Global Change Institute Climate Communication Fellow and course coordinator. “This free course explains why there is such a huge gap between the scientific community and the public.”

The participating scientists hope to narrow this gap in understanding, and ensure scientific data supports policy development and leads to maximum benefit for communities, economies and the environment.

With published research on climate literacy in the Journal of Geoscience Education, Schuenemann joins an exclusive list of instructors selected to teach sections of the seven-week course. She helped design the course and contributed a series of educational videos that will address climate change fundamentals and myths related to the jet stream, water vapour and carbon dioxide emissions.

The program will feature interviews with 75 notable scientific experts including Merchants of Doubt author Naomi Oreskes and Katharine Hayhoe, who has been named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.”

“I’m honored to join my colleagues to offer this program to anyone interested in the topic of climate change science,” said Schuenemann. “We hope to debunk climate misinformation by recognising the common fallacies hidden in common climate myths.”